‘I had faith in his track record’

PAUL McINERNEY (pictured) invested in Woodford’s Equity Income Fund when it was launched in 2014.

He had both a stocks-and-shares Isa and self-invested personal pension (Sipp) with Hargreaves Lansdown.

The 49-year-old former insurance worker, who lives in Sevenoaks, Kent, had previously invested in Invesco Perpetual more than ten years ago, when Woodford was with the investment management firm.

Paul says: ‘When he set up Woodford Equity Income Fund, I invested because I knew he had a good track record.’ He invested around £28,000 in 2014, with his nest egg now valued at around £23,000.

Paul — who has recently completed a finance and social sciences degree and invests from home — had been patient with the fund when it first began to underperform.

He says: ‘When I invest, I like to give a fund three or four years before I make a decision. I don’t like cutting my losses if I can help it. But in the past few months, I had been getting to the stage where I was wondering whether I still wanted to invest, and so, when I found out about the suspension on Monday through an email, I was irked — I didn’t obviously expect that to happen.’

Paul, who has around £400,000 invested through Hargreaves, believes the firm should have acted sooner. ‘I think Hargreaves is a good company, but it could have taken the fund off the Wealth 50 sooner.

‘The narrative I got from Hargreaves was that it had sat down with Woodford six months ago and he had told it how he was going to improve things. Perhaps when things didn’t improve three months ago, it should have taken the fund off the list.’

He adds: ‘I think Hargreaves probably acted in the same way as I did when the fund was launched. It had confidence in the fund because of his track record, not the fund itself.’